In The Heart Of Oregon’s RV History

From Silverton we moved an hour south to the Junction City area.  We titled our blog “In the Heart Of Oregon’s RV History” as Oregon once had a very thriving RV industry.  Some of the most venerable motor home brands in the industry were made here – Country Coach, Beaver, Safari, Monaco, and Marathon.  Today only one of those brands, Marathon, still is manufactured in Oregon, and Marathon is a small builder of very high end coaches from Prevost RV shells.  The Monaco brand still is manufactured by another company only in Indiana and at much lower volume than before they went bankrupt in 2009.

But part of the legacy of all those RV companies that used to manufacture in Oregon is a very vibrant RV service industry.  Country Coach has a parts and service center at the site where they used to manufacture and they still make and supply parts for and service the coaches they once built.  And there are a number of very good independent service shops that can service any and all of these brands and any other brand for that matter.

It was time for us to have all our scheduled service done – motor and generator oil and filter changes, fuel filter changes, and a few minor house repairs as well.  We went to a small independent shop where there is a guy who Gary has been buying parts from during the four years we have owned our coach.  Now I have to wonder about his choice of shops when we pull in and there are cows on one side of the shop and chickens on the other (which Alley had the chance to stalk on one of her walks).  The owner of the shop building who also does the chassis work does a little farming on the side as well as his RV service work on the side of his main job as service technician at a car dealership.  Our parts guy and one other technician also work out of this same shop.  It is an interesting arrangement but among them they have a lot of capability and are more reasonable with their service rates than the bigger shops.  And we had access to fresh brown eggs even if was a bit of an “aromatic” setting.

We did run into two problems we were not anticipating.  They discovered we had a coolant pump with a slow leak.  This pump is to push hot coolant coming off the engine up to the front and back for our dash heat functions.  We now know the source of why were were observing that we were losing a bit of coolant over time.  We also knew we had a tiny water leak from the back of our electrically operated toilet.  What we all assumed would be a simple and cheap fix turned into quite the expensive one when a motorized valve assembly had to be replaced.

We also took in one other shop in the area, a cabinet shop that does a lot of RV cabinet work.  We had this access panel on the dash that had a lot of open space behind it.  We had seen another coach like ours which had this space filled with a nice little cabinet that matched the other ones in the coach.  This cabinet shop in Junction City makes them and we had one made and installed for us.